


Forewarned

by Ornery Otter (Greiver_Dhark)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-25 06:14:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21871384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greiver_Dhark/pseuds/Ornery%20Otter
Summary: A second story spawned by the boggart in third year. What if Harry’s boggart had turned into Voldemort, as Lupin had thought it would?
Kudos: 28





	Forewarned

**Author's Note:**

> A/N For some reason I kept trying to spell ‘Voldemort’ as ‘Voldermort’ and had to correct myself every single time. I don’t know why all of a sudden I’m typing his name with an extra r, but it was very annoying since I use his name a lot in this fic.

He’d never actually seen Voldemort’s current form, not properly. 

Oh he’d seen the boy he’d been from the diary, and he’d seen the pale face stretched over the back of Quirrell’s head. And more recently he’d seen the shape of him, as green light flared and his mother’s body hit the floor. Mostly he’d been looking at his mother in those memories, stood before him and then fallen out of his reach. He didn’t remember seeing the Dark Lord’s face when he relived that memory on the train into Hogwarts. 

Despite that, Harry knew who it was as soon as the boggart took shape and given the gasp from Professor Lupin he expected that his teacher knew too. None of the other students seemed to realise at first however, but they definitely knew something was going on – the room lost its jovial atmosphere from the lesson in an instant and became hushed, tense. 

In front of him, the boggart of Voldemort breathed Harry’s name, the sound echoing around them strangely. It the same voice he’d heard in his memory over and over – both from his first year, and his unburied memories of his mother’s death. He’d know that voice anywhere, even if the body looked a bit different than he’d imagined. 

For a long moment, the boggart in Voldemort’s form just hovered in the air before them, robes floating around him almost like he was underwater. The long pale wand was held delicately in his hand, lain across his palm in a grip Harry had never seen before. 

Harry found that he hadn’t even the breath to try and cast the riddikulus spell. He stood, frozen in front of a man he both knew and had never seen before, and he couldn’t move. In his silence, Voldeboggart lowered until he was stood before them, oddly barefoot and near silent as he stepped towards Harry and the rest of the class. 

“To think, that such a simple boy could defeat me.” The wraith-like man seemed to hiss, sharp eyes staring intently at Harry’s face as if to read his every secret. “I will return, Harry Potter, you cannot stop that.” He chuckled darkly. “The real question is, how many of your friends will I kill before I get my hands on you, the same way I killed your father, and then your mother.” 

The words jolted Harry, because he remembered now, remembered his mother dying, remembered his father trying to stall the dark lord at the door, sacrificing himself to buy them time. Behind him someone gasped but he didn’t turn to look, couldn’t take his eyes off of the man – the boggart – in front of him. Voldemort raised his wand with a sinister smile, looking as if he was trying to decide on what sort of terrible curse to place him under. 

But Harry had already proven that he reacted to threats and fear with action, and he did the same here. His wand hand steadied as he raised it more firmly against the spectre of his parents’ murderer, and his voice didn’t shake at all when he spoke. 

“I’m going to stop you, Tom Riddle.” The boggart growled at him for using that name, smile dropping off his face and his wand arm tensing. “Just like I did last year, and the year before that, and all those years ago when I was a baby. You’ll always lose. Riddikulus.” 

The spell hit the boggart, who shrieked in defiance even as it turned translucent, like a ghost, and then hissed at them all before bolting back into the wardrobe Lupin had brought it in with. 

There was a pause as the rest of the class absorbed just what they’d seen, what had happened, before they were bursting into shouts. One or two students skipped the shouting stage and burst into tears instead, which diverted Lupin from approaching Harry and instead towards the fireplace where he could firecall Madam Pomfrey for some calming draughts and an extra pair of hands with which to dispense them. 

Thus it was a few minutes later when the man reached Harry himself, rescuing him from where he’d been mobbed by his classmates. Harry hadn’t known it at the time, but the true nature of his exploits the last two years hadn’t reached the school – Dumbledore had kept Voldemort’s presence hushed up. So while the students knew some kind of adventure/shenanigans had taken place, none of them knew it had been Voldemort behind the whole thing, physically within the castle for both of the last two years. 

“Are you alright there Harry?” Lupin put a hand on Harry’s shoulder and crouched down so as not to be looming over him. Harry just nodded, feeling a lot better now that the boggart was locked away. “I’m terribly sorry, I meant to step in so you wouldn’t have to face that, but I’m ashamed to say that I froze.” He admitted, chagrined . “I hope you don’t think too poorly of me. You were very brave though Harry, very well done. Might I ask though, when you cast the spell, what sort of humor was there to be found?” It couldn’t be said that there was anything funny about the mass-murdering dark lord after all. 

Harry’s eyes were bright behind his glasses, his attention firmly on Lupin now that his classmates kept a bit of distance from him. “Someone so powerful that the wizarding world to this day still fears his name, turned back into a powerless wraith, only able to possess beasts or the weakest of humans? I think that’s pretty funny actually.” Harry answered nonchalantly. “He used magic to become strong and now he can’t use it at all. Its like irony, I think.” There wasn’t much else funny about Voldemort after all, and he didn’t think dressing the man up in Neville’s gran’s clothing would make him any less terrifying. 

“I didn’t realise you knew what Voldemort looked like. He looked a little different, but not unrecognisably so to someone who had seen him before.” Lupin admitted. “It wasn’t unusual back when I was a boy for a boggart to turn into Voldemort, or his death eaters, but I suppose if anyone of your generation would it would be you.” 

“I didn’t realise until just now that nobody else knew.” Harry admitted uncomfortably. “But in my first year, Professor Quirrell was possessed by him. Voldemort’s face was on the back of his head. In my second year there was a cursed diary from when he was still a student here. It took his teenage shape using Ginny’s life force.” Harry frowned, while Lupin reeled in shock. Dumbledore had told him that there was movement on the enemy front, but he’d certainly not divulged that the castle had been infiltrated by the dark lord himself – twice! 

“Dumbledore didn’t tell me the full story either.” Remus admitted softly, shocked. “He gave a vague warning, but...” The man shook his head, and gave Harry’s shoulder another squeeze. “I don’t know why Dumbledore thought he should keep these details secret. I’m sure he has his reasons, but I’m glad its come out. The more warnings we all have, the better prepared we’ll be.” If Voldemort was already taking such overt action it meant that his followers would be as well. Even if people didn’t want to believe the monster was back, it was well known that not all of his death eaters had been captured. Fear of them coming back to threaten them would suffice for those less inclined to believe that Voldemort himself was not only still alive but also attempting to return. If such news saturated the populace for a while then eventually enough public concern would sway the rest into taking precaution. 

Anything further that Professor Lupin might have said was interrupted as students clamored once again to ask questions of Harry and Lupin both, Madam Pomfrey included. Fortunately for them the bell rang before things could deteriorate any more and Harry bolted out of class before they could pin him down. 

Following the lesson, Harry was hounded by his classmates and then the rest of the school once the news spread. Tired of telling it in bits and pieces and being asked over and over, Harry instead told everyone to stay in the great hall after dinner that night and direct all interested parties to do the same. He’d do a single, in-depth retelling, answer any questions, and expect to be left alone about it from then on. 

The teachers that evening were surprised when so many students stuck around after the evening meal vanished from all the tables. Almost the entire school stayed in their seats – including most of Slytherin house, to listen to Harry’s tale. A couple of the teachers stayed out of curiosity also, though of the head of houses, only Gryffindor's and Ravenclaw’s did so, and Harry got the impression that they only did so because they were uncomfortable leaving such a large group of students unsupervised. 

And so Harry began his tale. He could’ve started with his first year, but the story didn’t truly begin there and he may as well get the hardest part over with first. “I suppose my earliest memory, is the sound of my mum.” Harry told the room, the hall dead silent. “And Voldemort. She begged for my life. Its almost like he didn’t want to kill her, he kept telling her to step aside, but she wouldn’t. She said ‘take me instead’ and then he cast the killing curse, and she died.” 

Even those who had come to the hall that night to heckle the boy-who-lived were silenced by that opening. The solemn start to his tale was enough to remind them that regardless of the rumors of the boy now, of arrogance or ignorance, Harry Potter had been attacked and lost his parents to a madman. 

The rest of his story was easier to tell, in part because he wasn’t the only one telling it – Ron and Hermione both backed him up and took over the telling at several points. When it came to the chamber of secrets though, Harry realised he’d not spoken to Ginny about how much to tell the rest of the school. He didn’t actually know how many people knew what had happened to her. In the end she took it out of his hands though, and stood to do her own telling. The story didn’t cast her in a good light – as a foolish little girl, ensnared by a cursed book, but she was a Gryffindor and faced it bravely. 

By the time they’d finished, curfew was passed and several more teachers had trickled in in search for their students, only to settle down to listen instead. It was only when the question-and-answer session began to get unruly that Professor McGonagall stood and announced that it was bedtime and they’d all be escorted back to their Houses. 

In the aftermath of Harry’s evening session, a gamut of owls were sent out the next morning (or that evening, for those who thought the curfew beneath them and were sneaky enough to get to the owlery undetected) so it was really of no surprise when there was a special release of the Daily Prophet swooping into the hall that evening, thick with the story Harry had told, relayed by the students or parents of those students who’d sent letters. In such a short time there hadn’t been much research done to corroborate Harry’s story, beyond what the students themselves had written. Of course, the Prophet vowed to ‘get to the bottom of this!’ and ‘uncover the cover-up at Hogwarts’. 

Dumbledore wasn’t very happy with his deputy when he found out what had happened and that she had not stopped Harry when he spoke that night. It had taken him a lot of work to hush up what had occurred the last two years, to protect the school from coming under question. McGonagall merely responded that perhaps the school should be questioned, when Voldemort had been able to enter and remain within its walls twice, for most of the last few years. She didn’t like getting Howlers from parents or having the ministry turn up to interrogate them either, but doing nothing when their security had failed twice, when the dark lord had been under their noses for most of the last two years, amongst hundreds of children, was shameful. 

Despite the disruption to the faculty of the castle, for most of the students, life carried on. The gossip was juicy, the students were perhaps anxious about the infiltrations but otherwise thrilled at the excitement of it all, and not much changed. Speculation – both on the whether Harry was telling the truth, whether Hogwarts was safe at all, carried on for months afterwards. Even those who doubted that Voldemort was truly back couldn’t deny that someone had been in the castle endangering the students, and if they could get in then so could anyone else. Sirius Black had recently broken out of Azkaban, after all, and something needed to be done to make sure he didn’t just walk into Hogwarts like Quirrell had apparently done so. 

Still, aside from a lot of talking about security not much changed for the students. Harry himself refused to speak any further than he had done already – he kept his head down and later got attacked by Dementors in a quidditch game which sent the rest of the wizarding world once more at Dumbledore’s throat for lack of suitable protection for their precious offspring. 

Since it worked so well in the first place, Harry finished off his third year with another Great-hall special, detailing what he’d learned from Sirius about his innocence and Pettigrew’s guilt, and the ministry’s ham-handed attempt to execute a man without a trial, or even an interrogation. It was no wonder, Harry said, that so many death eaters had gotten away after Voldemort fell, if the ministry didn’t even bother to get information from the ones they did catch. Faith in the ministry plummeted – and Fudge in particular when he was thrown under the bus for his actions. 

When Harry’s name came out of the Triwizard cup, Hogwarts’ lack of security took another beating. Whether they believed Harry’s innocence or not, he shouldn’t have been able to be a contestant regardless. It was yet another mark against the school – and the ministry, who also had a responsibility while they were involved in the school. 

When Harry returned with Cedric’s body, claiming that Voldemort was back, he wasn’t met with scorn and disbelief as he otherwise would have been. Instead the students believed him, and had warned their parents who had warned their friends ever since the boggart lesson, and were not so close minded to the truth being dumped on them without warning. Years of having their eyes opened a fraction at a time had adjusted them to the truth, and years of watching Hogwarts and the ministry both fail to protect the students had led many to look towards their own security instead. 

When Voldemort rose, it wasn’t to a society of sheep, with their heads buried in the sand. Instead it was to a society of people who had learned to take their safety into their own hands or be let down when they entrusted it to others. People who had learned to cast patronus when the ministry couldn’t protect them from their own enforcers. Even if few could cast a corporal patronus, they could usually manage a shield and if they couldn’t, they knew to barricade in their homes – many under heavy wards. Security warding companies, and Gringott’s in particular, had gotten fat with coin the last year as scared citizens shelled out for home protections – not the least of which were anti-dementor wards. 

The boggart lesson of third year could have been just another class, unnoticed, unimportant to most. Instead the ripples from that class had changed the playing field for the rest of the wizarding world. 

Voldemort didn’t stand a chance.

**Author's Note:**

> I kinda got stuck at the end of this so sorry if it finishes a little oddly.


End file.
